[maemo-developers] MeeGo

[From: Martin Grimme]

Hi,

> But packaging is a whole part of a good user experience. Bad packaging
> means *bad* user experience, trust me.

I think this is the real problem about rpm here. Technically, I think
rpm is superior to deb but Debian's apt is still unmatched as a
package manager and the packagers do a better job (maybe because deb
is easier to create?). I haven't used yum for years, so it might be
better today, but back then (2004/2005), badly packaged stuff with bad
dependencies and the utter slowness of yum drove me away from Redhat.

I was involved in a project creating a Linux LiveCD builder based on
Fedora for customer-customisable CDs. The user selects the
applications she wants on the CD and the CD builder automatically
resolves the package dependencies to build the CD. While in theory
this idea was great and should easily be doable, we faced a lot of
dependency-resolving problems with the original Fedora packages.
Eeventually, we gave up on using yum for dependency-resolving and
tried to implement our own algorithms (or should I say heuristics?)
for resolving dependencies.
rpm is very complex and allows for a lot of things that deb simply
doesn't have. This makes it very hard to handle correctly.

I have also ported Redhat's Anaconda installer to work with gentoo's
emerge system for VidaLinux OS a few years ago. It's really hard stuff
as rpm is so complex and badly documented. There are magic numbers and
flags everywhere and this stuff is used. Redhat has a tradition of
making simple things very complex (I would call it obfuscated open
source, open source yes, but you rather don't dare touch it). Working
with Redhat's code is a tedious task.

OTOH, any maybe MeeGo will positively surprise me, rpm can be as
simple and reliable as deb.

Just my 2¢


Martin